New Perspectives in Science Education

Higher education's lacking ability to support non-text media as the primary channel of communication and new media´s juxtaposed trouble with conveying anything but rudimentary concepts is a growing problem linked to digitisation. Even in text-based media involving or enacting critical concepts is hard. From my perspective of technoscience focused on games and media which is heavaly influenced by poststructuralist and feminist epistemology in practise often result in 2 separate works where there should be one. Research and higher education's dependence on new measurement, specific hierarchies, and methodological approaches the concepts become tricky and end up presented under the lemmas - “Do as I say, not as I do”. Often leading to lectures that are edging hypocrisy in objectively describing what should be an ontological turn. On this subject I want to share observations that presented themselves as unplanned fallout from changes made as part of the 2020 restrictions employed to check Covid-19 . during a course meeting  a remark on the viability of Discord, a software employed in the scramble to substitute classroom seminars and parallel beehive discussions. The software had become the most recent mallet in an ongoing feud at campus and even if unrelated to the drama, Discord technically resides in a gray area concerning GDPR. The teacher primarily using Discord was aware of said drama but since “interesting things were happening” it remained in use. Probing revealed Discord acted as a medium not an nonpolitical tool. As a medium Discord superimposed rhizomatic structures and a high grade of agency resulting in knowledge production. Even though happily received in this case, the disruptive nature of change does raise questions. Would the outcome be the same if planned? How do we extract the produced knowledge in a way that is compatible with the format of higher education? How does examination and course-goals function without the classic tree structure for knowledge? To unwrap the case, media theory intertwined with a rhizomatic approach to knowledge production served as the primary model. An agential realist view on agency as something phenomena temporarily allowed is explored to examine ways to design educational situations that circumvent some of the problems facing universities in the wake of digitisation. Acting as a backdrop for this future are the ideas of web 2.0 and 3.0 and the questionable education dittos. The case, through the extraordinary circumstances created by Covid-19, highlights educational needs of one possible digitised future. Where the ability to recognize where knowledge is produced and the ability to extract and format that knowledge is essential.

Keywords: Epistemology, method, technoscience, media, digitisation.